*Ursula Oppens* has won equal renown as an interpreter of the established repertoire and as a champion of contemporary music. Her performances of music both old and new are marked by a powerful grasp of the composer’s musical intentions and an equally powerful command of the keyboard’s resources.
For the 2002-03 season, Oppens appears as a soloist with orchestras in West Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, Iowa, and Washington, and plays Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in California. She also collaborates with the Pacifica Quartet for performances at Caramoor in New York and in Louisiana, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas.
Highlights of recent seasons include residencies at the Tanglewood Music Center; Beethoven with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl; the Henry Cowell Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony; the Copland Piano Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Austin Symphony; Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with both the New Hampshire Symphony and the Memphis Symphony; at New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Harrison Concerto with the American Composers Orchestra; chamber music with the new music ensemble Thamyris at Emory University in Atlanta and with the Juilliard String Quartet; and various recitals.
As soloist with the leading orchestras of the U.S. and Europe, Oppens has concertized with the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the San Francisco, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Houston, Cincinnati, and Seattle symphonies, as well as the St. Paul and Los Angeles chamber orchestras, to name a few. In 1994, Oppens was presented for the first time on Carnegie Hall’s Keyboard Virtuoso Series and returned to that prestigious venue in 1997.
A co-founder of Speculum Musicae, a performing group that has pioneered new music since 1971, Oppens has recorded new works extensively. She received two Grammy nominations: for her Vanguard recording of Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated and for American Piano Music of Our Time. The latter was also named in John Rockwell’s Best of the Year survey for The New York Times along with her recording for New World Records of Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto. Oppens’s releases include a disc of chamber music by Elliott Carter with the Arditti Quartet on the Audivis label and Charles Wuorinen’s Piano Quintet on Koch International Classics. Other recordings include Joan Tower’s Piano Concerto on De Note Records; Rzewski’s Night Crossing with Fishermen, and a disc of Schoenberg’s vocal music with soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, both for Music and Arts; and the Brahms Viola Sonatas with Barbara Westphal on Bridge Records.
Oppens studied piano with her mother, Edith Oppens, as well as with Leonard Shure and Guido Agosti. and earned her master’s degree at the Juilliard School, where she studied with Felix Galimir and Rosina Lhevinne. As an undergraduate at RadclifTe College, she studied English literature and economics. A native New Yorker, Oppens made her New York debut under the auspices of Young Concert Artists. She won first prize in the Busoni International Piano Competition in 1969. and was awarded the Diploma d’onore of the Accadcmia Chigiani in 1970. In 1976 she won an Avery Fisher Career Grant which led to a performance with the New York Philharmonic.
Oppens is the John Evans Distinguished Professor of Music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
